- Joined
- Sep 27, 2009
- Location
- MS Gulf Coast
My PC [for reference]
CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE
Mainboard: ASRock 770 iCafe socket AM3+
RAM: 8GB PC3-10600 DDR3@1333
GPU: Radeon HD 7870 2GB [single fan]
PSU: Antec Earthwatts 650W [EA650]
HDD1: Western Digital 650GB SATA III [primary w/OS]
HDD2: Western Digital 350GB SATA III [storage w/o OS]
OS: Windows 7 ultimate x64
Video Driver: Catalyst suite ver 13.1 [current]
I'm hoping a veteran tech/modder whom cruises these boards often happens to stumble across this thread because I could really use the help. I've been modding/building pc's all my life and for the first I've finally come across a problem that truly has me stumped. Please forgive me if this turns out to be a long post, but I have a lot of information to convey because it is a multi-facet problem and to give a decent understanding to the reader they have to know all aspects of the problem. I'm going to try to shorten it where I can.
So I went ahead and upgraded my old video card, a radeon hd 5770 1GB, to a new in the box 7870 2GB by XFX and the first thing I noticed was how it the 7870 requires (2) PCI-e 6 pin from my psu so I knew the power draw from the card was going to be huge, if not double from my 5770. At first the new card worked great...for about a week or so.
The problems I was having with the 7870 can be characterized by two main events:
[1] - There would be times when I would turn my PC on and sometime after POST but before windows loaded I would inexplicably lose the video signal and apparently windows would still continue to load even without the video. The monitor would go blank and the light on my monitor would go from blue [on w/ a video signal] to orange [on w/o a signal]. Hitting keys on the keyboard or moving the mouse would not bring back the signal and when this happened the only thing I could do was press and hold the power button for 5 seconds for a hard shutdown and reboot. I might go through 2 or 3 of these semi-failed boots before I could get into windows and keep a video signal. However, once I got into windows and had the machine running for a few minutes everything worked fairly well for the most part [see issue 2 coming up]. The problem is this issue with the loss of video signal happened infrequently so I never knew on which days and it would boot without a hitch and when I would have to go through this failed boot process. My computer might work for a week without a problem and then on a random day it would happen again.
[2] - The second incident with the 7870 was a relatively minor one, but still aggravating. After playing a game for 20-30 minutes I would hear the card's fan rev up to full speed and then cut back down. It would go through this process of randomly rev'ing up and then slowing back down. It would get to a point of I would become so aggravated I would have to cut the game off. The fan issue was most likely to occur on one of those random days when a failed boot with the loss of video had already happened and it would only occur during gaming. The fan did not act up playing videos or running any other multimedia application.
With the limited equipment I have at my disposal I did troubleshooting of my own and of course issues like these are going to break down into either being a hardware or software issue.
Well, I checked everything I could and couldn't figure it out so I ended up creating a support ticket with XFX and did a RMA to have them look at the card. When I took the 7870 out of my system I noticed traces of burnout on the silver backplate where the dvi ports are located. What I had found was black vapor and the best way I can describe black vapor is kind of like when you burn a tip of a paperclip with a flame until it turns red and then press it against a second paperclip - after a while you will see black vapor appear on the second paperclip. That's what I found on the back of the card and the back panel on my pc is metal just like the backplate of the 7870 so this convinced the problem was the card even more.
I ended up coming to the conclusion the problem was heat; the 7870 was not dissipating heat inside the case but building it up instead. When the card was getting hot outside of normal operational parameters there was a transference of heat between the backplate of the card and the back panel of my pc so traces of black vapor appeared on the card. This is the only sensible theory I have at the moment.
When I took the 7870 out and put my 5770 back in I did a clean driver removal and reinstall. Since running my machine with the 5770 for over a week now while the other card is in RMA my machine has been working perfectly normal. Not one failed boot, I can leave the pc on literally all day and it doesn't miss a beat when I launch an application, and the fan has not acted up at all. So this means the problem has to be the 7870, right?
Well, I called XFX to get a status update on my RMA and the tester did report back in today - no fault was found with the card...big frigging surprise there
. The tech told me they tested the card in an open face barebone system which is literally a motherboard [with processor and ram], the card, a hard drive and a monitor. If the problem is heat, like I truly suspect, they wouldn't be able to tell nor cause the conditions of the problems to reoccur.
So, I'm waiting on their final decision, but they're more than likely just going to send the 7870 back to me. If the problems do reoccur when I put the 7870 back into my pc then I'm going to be left stuck and clueless.
Because I haven't had any issue running my 5770 I've pretty much ruled out other hardware for being the problem when I was running the 7870. If it was due to the pci-e slot on the motherboard or the psu then I should have encountered some kind of problem running my 5770, but everything has been fine and this includes gaming too. So, if the problems I had experienced are not due to the 7870, like XFX claim, then what gives? Any ideas?
I know there are a lot of very intelligent and knowledgeable techs out there so somebody has probably seen worse than this, right? I'm clueless, I feel like an idiot and I'm grasping at straws to make sense of it.
CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE
Mainboard: ASRock 770 iCafe socket AM3+
RAM: 8GB PC3-10600 DDR3@1333
GPU: Radeon HD 7870 2GB [single fan]
PSU: Antec Earthwatts 650W [EA650]
HDD1: Western Digital 650GB SATA III [primary w/OS]
HDD2: Western Digital 350GB SATA III [storage w/o OS]
OS: Windows 7 ultimate x64
Video Driver: Catalyst suite ver 13.1 [current]
I'm hoping a veteran tech/modder whom cruises these boards often happens to stumble across this thread because I could really use the help. I've been modding/building pc's all my life and for the first I've finally come across a problem that truly has me stumped. Please forgive me if this turns out to be a long post, but I have a lot of information to convey because it is a multi-facet problem and to give a decent understanding to the reader they have to know all aspects of the problem. I'm going to try to shorten it where I can.
So I went ahead and upgraded my old video card, a radeon hd 5770 1GB, to a new in the box 7870 2GB by XFX and the first thing I noticed was how it the 7870 requires (2) PCI-e 6 pin from my psu so I knew the power draw from the card was going to be huge, if not double from my 5770. At first the new card worked great...for about a week or so.
The problems I was having with the 7870 can be characterized by two main events:
[1] - There would be times when I would turn my PC on and sometime after POST but before windows loaded I would inexplicably lose the video signal and apparently windows would still continue to load even without the video. The monitor would go blank and the light on my monitor would go from blue [on w/ a video signal] to orange [on w/o a signal]. Hitting keys on the keyboard or moving the mouse would not bring back the signal and when this happened the only thing I could do was press and hold the power button for 5 seconds for a hard shutdown and reboot. I might go through 2 or 3 of these semi-failed boots before I could get into windows and keep a video signal. However, once I got into windows and had the machine running for a few minutes everything worked fairly well for the most part [see issue 2 coming up]. The problem is this issue with the loss of video signal happened infrequently so I never knew on which days and it would boot without a hitch and when I would have to go through this failed boot process. My computer might work for a week without a problem and then on a random day it would happen again.
[2] - The second incident with the 7870 was a relatively minor one, but still aggravating. After playing a game for 20-30 minutes I would hear the card's fan rev up to full speed and then cut back down. It would go through this process of randomly rev'ing up and then slowing back down. It would get to a point of I would become so aggravated I would have to cut the game off. The fan issue was most likely to occur on one of those random days when a failed boot with the loss of video had already happened and it would only occur during gaming. The fan did not act up playing videos or running any other multimedia application.
With the limited equipment I have at my disposal I did troubleshooting of my own and of course issues like these are going to break down into either being a hardware or software issue.
Well, I checked everything I could and couldn't figure it out so I ended up creating a support ticket with XFX and did a RMA to have them look at the card. When I took the 7870 out of my system I noticed traces of burnout on the silver backplate where the dvi ports are located. What I had found was black vapor and the best way I can describe black vapor is kind of like when you burn a tip of a paperclip with a flame until it turns red and then press it against a second paperclip - after a while you will see black vapor appear on the second paperclip. That's what I found on the back of the card and the back panel on my pc is metal just like the backplate of the 7870 so this convinced the problem was the card even more.
I ended up coming to the conclusion the problem was heat; the 7870 was not dissipating heat inside the case but building it up instead. When the card was getting hot outside of normal operational parameters there was a transference of heat between the backplate of the card and the back panel of my pc so traces of black vapor appeared on the card. This is the only sensible theory I have at the moment.
When I took the 7870 out and put my 5770 back in I did a clean driver removal and reinstall. Since running my machine with the 5770 for over a week now while the other card is in RMA my machine has been working perfectly normal. Not one failed boot, I can leave the pc on literally all day and it doesn't miss a beat when I launch an application, and the fan has not acted up at all. So this means the problem has to be the 7870, right?
Well, I called XFX to get a status update on my RMA and the tester did report back in today - no fault was found with the card...big frigging surprise there
. The tech told me they tested the card in an open face barebone system which is literally a motherboard [with processor and ram], the card, a hard drive and a monitor. If the problem is heat, like I truly suspect, they wouldn't be able to tell nor cause the conditions of the problems to reoccur. So, I'm waiting on their final decision, but they're more than likely just going to send the 7870 back to me. If the problems do reoccur when I put the 7870 back into my pc then I'm going to be left stuck and clueless.
Because I haven't had any issue running my 5770 I've pretty much ruled out other hardware for being the problem when I was running the 7870. If it was due to the pci-e slot on the motherboard or the psu then I should have encountered some kind of problem running my 5770, but everything has been fine and this includes gaming too. So, if the problems I had experienced are not due to the 7870, like XFX claim, then what gives? Any ideas?
I know there are a lot of very intelligent and knowledgeable techs out there so somebody has probably seen worse than this, right? I'm clueless, I feel like an idiot and I'm grasping at straws to make sense of it.
